To Photograph a Hummingbird

hummer
Hummingbirds are hard to photograph. At least, I find them so. I’ll grant you, my camera skills are a notch or two down from professional, and I might do better if my selection in glass were broader than a single Sigma 18–200 mm zoom lens.

But that’s what I’ve got to work with, paired with my now somewhat dated but nevertheless trusty Canon Rebel XTi, and so I make do. And I’m often pleased with the results.

The two photos on this page were culled from several dozen photos taken on two separate days. I set up my tripod out on the balcony a couple feet away from the hummingbird feeder, then hunkered down on the other side of the sliding glass door with my remote shutter. Six feet of cable gave me ample distance. You’d think it would have been easy.

But hummingbirds, feisty as they are, are nevertheless skittish when it comes to the click of a shutter. Plus–and I know this will come as a surprise, but it’s nevertheless true–the little buggers don’t sit still long enough for a person to get them in decent focus.

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Yes, of course I pre-focused, but I still had to attain a decent balance between depth of field and shutter speed–and believe me, with hummingbirds, you can’t have a fast enough shutter speed. You’re barely starting at 1/250; those wings will be nothing more than a blur. Today I worked at 1/320 and 1/400, and even at those faster speeds it was like trying to photograph a rocket in flight–a rocket that backs up in a trice and sideslips on a whimsy.

But I’m not complaining. Not really. The little guys are fun to watch and just as fun to photograph, and if I’ve only got a couple decent shots to show for my efforts so far, well, at least I got those. Something to remember the hummingbirds by over the long winter. They won’t be around much longer. One morning, maybe just a few days from now, or maybe in a few weeks, I’ll wake up, look for the little rascals carrying on their miniature dogfights with the hornets and with each other around the feeder, and they’ll be gone.

So now is the time to get some pics. And I have to say, the practice is addictive. Once a body gets started on hummingbird photography, the drive is on for new angles, just the right light, and exquisite sharpness. In other words, for the perfect hummingbird photo.

It’s a Holy Grail that continues to elude me, but I keep on trying, and I guess I’ll continue until the hummers are gone. Then I’ll sit back and enjoy my photos, perfect or not. These are the first of the lot. I like them fine, and I hope you do, too.

September 18, 2011 by
Filed Under: Life, Michigan, Nature, Photography Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Fourth Patterns with Altered Dominants

This post builds upon a jazz improvisation post I wrote a month ago titled Fourth Patterns: Three Exercises to Build Your Technique. That post gave you some quartal patterns to practice that took you around the cycle of fifths. While I pointed at the harmonic possibilities, I left you to sort them out for yourself. In this post, I’m providing a specific application by applying fourth groupings to altered dominant chords (V+7#9).

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Click on the image to your left to enlarge it. The first thing you’ll encounter is a brief exercise that takes you through a fourth pattern moving by whole steps, first down, then back up. It’s a simple exercise. Once you’ve got it down, practice it starting on the note F instead of Eb; you’ll be using the same notes you’ve already practiced, but you’ll reverse the direction of the patterns.

From there, play the same exercise starting on the note E. You’ll now have a different set of notes. Finally, start on the note F#. Once you’ve worked that into your fingers, you’ll have covered all the possibilities.

Moving On to Application

The material you’ve just practiced is designed to help you develop technique specific to the application that follows. Now we’ll move on to that application, as indicated by the chords.

For each chord, you’ll find two groupings of the fourth pattern spaced a major second apart. Together, the two patterns contain the following chord tones: #9, b9, b7, +5, +4*. The patterns are arranged in eighth notes that resolve to a consonant chord tone, thus:

    •  In the first two bars, the b9 resolves to a whole note on the chord root.
    •  In the second two bars, the #9 resolves to a whole note on the major third of the chord.

I’ve written down the applications for six keys. I’m sure you can figure out the remaining six on your own, and you should. Don’t be lazy! You need to become familiar with all twelve chords. Moreover, I encourage you to experiment with variations on these patterns. This exercise will open up your technique for altered dominants–and other harmonic applications–but you should view it as a springboard for further exploration.

As is so often the case, the material I’m sharing comes to you fresh from my own practice sessions. It’s a chronicle of my personal learning curve, and I hope it assists you in yours.

If you found this article helpful, you’ll find many more like it on my Jazz Theory, Technique & Solo Transcriptions sub-page.

Practice hard, practice with focus–and, as always, have fun!

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* If you add two more tones–the chord root and the major third–you’ll get a complete diminished whole tone scale. In this application exercise, the whole notes use those two missing tones as resolutions.

September 17, 2011 by
Filed Under: Band, Jazz, Jazz Improvisation and Technique, Music, Saxophone Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

September 11: Ten Years Ago Today

Last year on this day, I wrote a post commemorating the horror and heroism that unfolded on September 11, 2001. I cannot improve on that article, and so I invite you to read it, and to remember what your own day was like 10 years ago. If you were old enough back then to grasp the magnitude of what happened, I am certain that you will never forget it. Like me, you will relive it every year until your power to remember is no more. My post written last year speaks for me again today with undiminished vigor, and will do so for years to come.

There is, however, one aspect of September 11, 2001, which that article did not consider. It is something I’ve found myself musing on lately, a phenomenon that is inevitable as generation follows generation. It has to do with our capacity to remember–not to merely observe a date on the calendar, but to recall how that day unfolded for us; what we were doing at the time; how we felt as we watched the Twin Towers burn and collapse, and as news poured in of another plane crashing into the Pentagon, and yet another plunging into a field in Pennsylvania.

While millions of us today can never forget those events, a growing number of Americans are incapable of remembering them with the same stark emotions. This seems incredible to those of us who were adults back then. Nevertheless, it is true: Ten years later, a generation is entering adulthood for whom the tragedy of that fiery morning is but a dim recollection from childhood; and a post-9/11 generation has been born, and is being born, which will contemplate this date from no more than a historic perspective, not with the grief, fear, and fury felt by those of us who witnessed militant Islam’s attack on our country firsthand.

It is that way for all of us. Each generation has its own indelible landmarks. Whatever lies outside those milestones necessarily produces a less visceral, secondhand frame of reference. Living memories belong to those who have lived them. Those who have not can only embrace–and must embrace–such defining events as part of our beloved country’s spiritual DNA, which the sheer force of being Americans compels us all to honor.

I am 55 years old. I was in second grade on November 22, 1963, when the mother superior at my Catholic school entered the room and informed us that President Kennedy had been assassinated. We children gasped–I remember that. But I don’t remember much more. I was only seven years old, too young to feel the pathos of that defining time in our nation, or to process its significance from an adult perspective.

My father fought in World War II. He was on the front lines at the Battle of the Bulge, killing men and watching his friends being killed. On August 6, 1945–his birthday–Dad was in a boat bound for Japan when the “Little Boy” bomb detonated over Hiroshima. That was, he said, the best birthday gift he had ever gotten. To those who maintain that the atomic bomb was an atrocity perpetrated by our country on thousands of innocent Japanese civilians, let me remind you that Japan was the one who first attacked us. And you weren’t on that boat with my dad, headed for what you were certain would be your death. You weren’t around back then.

But neither was I. Nor was I there to feel the joy of V-E Day on May 7, 1945; or to celebrate the Japanese surrender to America on V-J Day, September 2, 1945. No, I was not there. My father was, not I. The closest I could come to even remotely sharing those times with him was nearly 20 years later in the early 60s, as a boy sitting with Dad in our living room in Niles, Michigan, watching the ABC series Combat on our Zenith black-and-white TV.

Decades later, in 1998, I watched the intense motion picture Saving Private Ryan. I did so out of a desire to better understand my father and the war that had shaped him. The movie was powerful, wrenching, and helpful. But it was not the same thing as being there. My dad had been where I could never go.

Nor will my father ever be where I have been. Each generation ultimately hands off this nation and its history to the generations that follow. Those generations cannot experience what we have experienced. We can only hope they will learn from events which for them are historic, but which for us older Americans have been all too real–learn in a way that wisely balances hope-filled idealism which makes life worth living with a realism that recognizes evil for what it is, and stands against it.

Hitler is dead. Bin Laden is dead. But neo-Naziism lives on, and so does Al Qaeda. The enemy is always with us, on foreign shores and in our midst. Perhaps the worst damage he could inflict on us is that in fighting him, we should become like him. Let us therefore look to our own souls, and hold up a higher standard–an enduring nobility of character which only God can empower us to carry onward, torch-like, man by man and woman by woman, from one generation to the next.

In Christ,

Bob

September 11, 2011 by
Filed Under: Life, Opinion & Editorial, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Hurricane Rain

Standing on the waterfront of Atlantic Beach watching the brobdingnagian surf from Hurricane Irene batter the shore, it didn’t immediately occur to me that I was getting drenched. But I was. The driest part of me was my hair, covered as it was by my rain hood. Otherwise, I was thoroughly soaked. But I was oblivious to my waterlogged state, and this is something that, upon contemplation, I find remarkable.

Irene was my first–and quite likely will be my last–exposure to hurricane rain. What strikes me about that rain, apart from its intensity, is how extraordinarily comfortable it feels. It is the warmest rain imaginable, unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in Michigan or anywhere else in the United States. Irene’s rain was so bathwater warm, and the air so equally balmy, that there was no sense of chill present to tell my skin, “Yo! You are freeking wet!”

A warm summer shower in Michigan is something that your inner thermometer still registers as fairly cool, though not objectionably so. As for the rains of a northern autumn, those will freeze you to the marrow. In contrast, Irene’s rain was so warm that at first I was barely aware of being rained on. It wasn’t until I looked down at my legs and saw the state of my shorts that I realized I was saturated.

Top-to-bottom saturated, it turned out. My Helly Hansen rain jacket, which had seen little use since its faithful service 10 years ago up in the Canadian wilderness, was in a state of deterioration that rendered it worthless. Unknown to me, pieces of blue rubber from the collar were cleaving to my neck in a ring. The zipper wouldn’t zip. And the warm rains of Irene had penetrated my protective layer and drenched my shirt. Had I been in Michigan, I’d have known about this state of affairs quickly. But not in Irene’s tepid environment. Chill just isn’t a part of the skin’s alert system in a tropical cyclone. A person could drown in comfort simply by standing outdoors.

Now, isn’t that fascinating. Okay, maybe not. Not to those of you who live on the Gulf Coast, anyway. But for a lad from a small West Michigan cow town, it’s the peak of interest. Here in the frozen hinterlands, we reach for novelty where we can, and hurricane rain qualifies.

Ahem … okay, enough for tonight. There’s a bowl of oatmeal that I want to watch congeal. Signing off.

September 7, 2011 by
Filed Under: Nature, Storm Chasing, Weather Tagged With: , , , ,

Video Tutorial #1: The Augmented Scale

The time has come for me to kick it up a notch on Stormhorn.com with my first video tutorial on jazz. This one is on the augmented scale, a favorite of mine.

I feel a bit presumptuous taking this step, since I’m putting myself out in front of you, my musical readers, in a new way that suggests a high degree of expertise. The reality is, I’m a mostly self-taught saxophonist who lives in a rural, bedroom community of Grand Rapids, Michigan, where you can still drive just a few blocks to find plenty of corn and cows. That said, I know what I know. More important, I’m a perpetual learner, and I like to share what I’ve learned, often as I’m still in the process of learning it. This video tutorial represents my effort to offer you more value by, er, augmenting your learning experience. (Pun intended. Rimshot, please.)

In the Jazz Theory, Technique, and Solo Transcriptions section of my Jazz page, you’ll find a good number of written articles on the augmented scale, complete with exercises, to supplement this video. One thing they can’t do, though, is familiarize you with the sound of the scale. That’s where this tutorial comes in handy. I hope you’ll enjoy it.

September 6, 2011 by
Filed Under: Band, Christian Music, Jazz, Jazz Improvisation and Technique, Music, Saxophone, Video Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

September 3, 2011, Outflow Boundaries

Yesterday morning my friend Kurt Hulst called to say, “Grab your camera. There’s a great shelf cloud coming your way. It passed my location before I could get a picture.”

Okay, then. My apartment faces east, and all I could see was blue sky. Not even a hint that a storm might be approaching from the west, and usually one gets at least some kind of a clue. But I snatched up my camera and car keys regardless and headed outside.

Yes, there it was–a hazy arcus cloud moving my way from the west and northwest. I hopped in my car, with the intention of finding a better view for taking photographs than my parking lot afforded. But the cloud was moving faster than I realized, and by the time I reached 108th Street, it was almost on top of me. So, with the wind kicking up flurries of leaves in front of me, I headed east, thinking to put a little distance between the shelf cloud and me.

Several miles down the road, I turned north, parked by a buffalo farm, stepped out of my car to get a look, and realized immediately that my cause was lost. The cloud was right overhead. It had to have been moving at least 60 mph. So much for weather photos. Within seconds, I was looking at the backside of the arcus, and it wasn’t particularly photogenic.

For that matter, there wasn’t much to it. No ensuing rain, no lightning, no thunder, no storm at all, just blue skies. I can’t speak for other parts of the country, but here in Michigan it is an odd thing to observe an impressive-looking shelf cloud with absolutely nothing behind it! The cloud evidently had formed as the isolated effect of cold outflow from dissipated storms back in Wisconsin, in conjunction with a closer, severe-warned MCS to the north. Back at home, I could see the outflow boundary arching southwest all the way down into Indiana and moving rapidly east.

Yesterday seemed to be the day for such phenomenon to be clearly defined on the radar. Later in the afternoon, GR3 showed a similarly highly distinct outflow boundary down in northern Indiana. The source of this one was easy

ofb
to see: storms to its northwest and north. It looked pretty vigorous, and I wondered if it was putting on a show similar to what I had witnessed.

As an item of curiosity and an example of a highly defined outflow boundary–I suppose you could call it a runaway gust front–I captured a screen shot. Click on the image to enlarge it.

September 4, 2011 by
Filed Under: Michigan, Nature, Outdoors, Storm Chasing, Weather, Weather Radar Tagged With: , , , , ,

The Smart Shopper’s Guide to Swan Meat, Revisited

Evidently a lot of you Stormhorn readers are swan meat junkies. I had no idea, but judging by the continuing traffic to an article I posted back in February, 2010, I don’t know what else to conclude.

I wrote The Smart Shopper’s Guide to Swan Meat as a tongue-in-cheek means of processing my sticker shock after discovering that 1) you can purchase swan for consumption online, and 2) it’ll cost you a heckuva lot–no, make that an unbelievable lot–of money.

I don’t know what first inspired me to investigate this question of swan meat availability and pricing. It’s not like I’ve harbored a longstanding craving for the stuff, and after doing the pricing research, my impulse to purchase swan meat has, if anything, declined to the point of being impossible to detect by the most powerful microscope.

So I’m fascinated by the fact that one-and-a-half years after I wrote it, my quirky post on swan meat continues to draw a small but steady stream of readers. The article has nothing whatever to do with either jazz saxophone or storm chasing, which are the foci of this blog. Yet it’s one of the more popular pieces of writing I’ve ever done.

Which is why I’m resubmitting it for your consumption–that is to say, your edification. How edified you’ll actually be after reading it is questionable, but you’ll at least be in a better position to determine whether that massive hankering you’ve been feeling for blackneck swan is feasible in the light of your food budget. In any event, here, in case you missed it three paragraphs back, is the link to the original article.

I should mention that the pricing I had mentioned for 1-800-STEAKS remains accurate. However, while the link to the Exotic Meat Market still works, I no longer see swan meat among their impressive list of offerings. Given their pricing compared to the competition, swan was clearly a loss leader that outlived its usefulness.

Now, if you’ve got a few extra bucks to spend and would like to treat yourself to something that’s a step up from swannish pauper’s fare, you might consider adding Kobe beef to this week’s shopping cart.

As for me, hamburger sounds fine.

September 3, 2011 by
Filed Under: Humor, Life, Opinion & Editorial, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,

Hurricane Irene in North Carolina

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Hurricane Irene demonstrated to me conclusively that hurricanes aren’t my thing. Maybe I’m too cautious; maybe I’m downright chicken; maybe I’m smart. Certainly I’m inexperienced; just as certainly, I’ve never felt the same fascination for the hurricane environment, as I’ve understood it, as I have for tornadoes and supercells. However these various factors work in combination, the bottom line is, while I’m glad I got the opportunity last weekend to experience an impressive degree of Irene, if not her full fury, I doubt that my future holds any more hurricane interceptions.

Hurricanes and tornadoes are different animals, and the mindsets required for a severe weather junkie to appreciate the two are worlds apart. A tornado is ephemeral, arriving and departing in minutes; a hurricane is a time commitment of hours, possibly a lot of hours. A tornado is something you go to see; a hurricane is something you go to experience. A tornado’s human impact is terrestrial; a hurricane’s, amphibious, bringing the ocean with it as it arrives onshore. A tornado is something you seek to avoid getting munched by; a hurricane is something you purposely allow to ingest you, and it requires that you be willing to risk circumstances of a kind and scope that can outstrip anything even the worst tornado can produce.

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I’m by no means minimizing the lethal, wholesale destructiveness of tornadoes. I’m just saying, we’re comparing apples and oranges. Yes, both storms pack a heckuva lotta wind, both are capable of horrific impact on communities, and both can kill you equally dead. But beyond that, the similarities vanish.

Different personalities embrace the variables in different ways. My friend and long-time storm chasing partner, Bill Oosterbaan, is now hooked on hurricanes. His brother, Tom, enjoyed doing the eyewall with Bill at Morehead City, North Carolina, but I suspect that once was enough for him. As for me, witnessing the massive surf pounding Atlantic Beach as Irene approached, and watching tropical-storm winds and hurricane-force gusts blast our hotel inland at Greenville, was all the taste of Irene I needed. Don’t get me wrong–the experience was thoroughly exhilarating, and I’m really glad I went. I just can’t see doing it again, particularly with a stronger hurricane than Irene.

I never expected to go to begin with. As Bill and Tom were making plans a few days in advance, I chimed in on the discussion, but I had neither the money nor the driving desire to join them, though I confess that I was intrigued. Then Bill called me three hours before their departure with the news that their trip would be underwritten and wouldn’t cost a cent. Would I like to go?

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It was a kind, thoughtful offer. Bill knew that this storm season–historic and record-breaking as it has been for tornadoes–had been a miserable one for me as far as chasing went. Between family responsibilities and personal finances, it had been an utter washout, to the point where I’ve felt awkward even calling myself a storm chaser. Yeah, I’ve earned the merit badge over the last 15 years, but you wouldn’t know it judging by this year. Bill and Tom, good friends that they are, knew that I had felt the disappointment keenly and wanted me to have at least something to show for circum 2011.

So, making a last-minute decision, I grabbed the opportunity, threw some clothes into my softside, grabbed my gear, and off we went.

GPS and Live-Stream Hassles

Bill had made arrangements with WOOD TV8 to live-stream Irene using his new, super-fast Asus quad-core laptop. Unfortunately, DeLorme’s serial port emulator wouldn’t work with the laptop’s 64-bit Windows 7 OS, nor would Bill’s GPSGate recognize the DeLorme puck. The long and short of it was, while Bill could stream through iMap, there was no way of showing his location, rendering his live stream useless.

My computer isn’t as fast as Bill’s, but it’s fast enough, and it didn’t pose the same problems. However, for some reason, I kept losing my mobile signal Friday as we headed towards Morehead City. Worse yet, my output on iMap appeared jerky and horribly pixelated, to the point where I finally just gave it up. So much for live streaming for both of us. And so much for getting the trip underwritten.

Big Surf at Atlantic Beach

Friday, August 26. After checking into our hotel in Greenville, North Carolina, we set off for Morehead City. When we arrived, the bridge to Atlantic Beach beckoned, so over we went. We parked in a lot occupied by various media crews as well as casual sightseers. With just two hours before law enforcement intended to start kicking people off the island, we bundled on our rain gear and took in the massive waves pounding the shoreline.

The eye of the hurricane was still a good 150 or more miles south of us, but the wind was stiff and the sea a maelstrom of spuming breakers and brown, roiling undertow. My YouTube video doesn’t do justice to that wild, watery scene. The waves farther out in the video had to have been a good 15 feet high, their tops trailing spray into the gale as they raced toward shore.

By the way, that’s me in the rain jacket and shorts, cavorting in front of the waves. Hi, Mom!

Bill was determined to stick around and experience the eyewall, and I had the nervous sense that he wanted to hang out on the barrier island. My concern was that the island might wind up underwater, and that even Morehead City could get inundated by floodwaters, or the storm surge, or both. It just didn’t seem wise to me to locate ourselves that close to the Atlantic shoreline. Irene, which the day before had been forecast to make landfall as a category 3 storm, had by now been downgraded to a top-end category 1, but she was still an abnormally huge hurricane. I was concerned that our escape routes would be cut off and we would find ourselves stranded, with nowhere to go and the ocean encroaching on us as Irene’s eye moved in. High winds I’m fine with–bring ’em on; I like it. But I prefer them as a dry-land phenomenon, not a maritime experience.

Ultimately, I wimped out. The guys graciously brought me back to our hotel in Greenville, which was where I’d thought we would ride out the storm to begin with. I felt ashamed of myself for inconveniencing them, and I knew that Bill was disappointed. We’ve shared so many storm adventures over the years, but this wouldn’t be one of them. To be fair to myself, my reasonings–not all of which I’ve elaborated on here–were, I believe, fairly sound. Plus, again, I’ve never felt drawn to hurricanes the way I am to tornadoes and severe thunderstorms. Still, I had moved from an asset to a liability.

I beat myself up for quite awhile, so in case anyone reading this post feels inclined to pitch in their two cents, spare yourself the effort. I already did the job for you. That said, there was something to be said for peeling off my sopping clothes–which, thanks to a catastrophic failure on the part of my Helly Hansen rain suit, had gotten totally drenched–and then kicking back on a dry bed to watch the unfolding coverage of Irene on TV.

Saturday, August 27

When I awoke, Irene was making landfall at Morehead City. I picked up the phone and called Bill. No answer, and no surprise. I wasn’t certain whether the cell phone towers were working, but I was sure that the guys had their hands full. The television showed the west side of Irene’s eye squarely over their heads.

Outside, the wind was lashing a tree out in the courtyard and blowing a fine spray of rain against the window. Hurricane rain is not like the rain you get with an ordinary thunderstorm. The hydrometeors are smaller, halfway between droplets and wind-driven drizzle. But what a drizzle! Watching the stuff lash horizontally across the landscape, alternating between lighter respites and sudden, heavier bursts that tumble along like fog shot from a cannon, you really can’t fathom just how much is actually falling. The answer is, lots, an almost inconceivable amount.

By and by, I got curious what the view offered from a vantage point other than my fourth-floor room. Grabbing my video camera, I took the elevator downstairs and headed for the hotel entrance. There, for the first time, I got a good taste of Irene. Greenville may not have been in range of the hurricane’s full force, but the westward extent of her tropical-storm winds had surprised forecasters, and my location lay within a concentrated area of those winds. With sustained speeds of 55 mph and gusts as high as 75 mph, there was more than enough to hold my interest.

The higher winds in a hurricane are associated with its rain bands. When you see one of those bands approaching your location on radar, you can count on two things happening simultaneously: It is going to get very rainy, and it is going to get very windy. The transition occurs with a suddenness that verges on explosive, and in Greenville, its effect was everything you could imagine. Trees were down, and more were going down all the time. Branches were snapping. Power was out over a large area. In the hotel, the electricity flickered off and on, off and on, but amazingly, it somehow stayed with us for all but one two-hour stretch. As for Internet connection, forget it. I had been without radar updates since shortly after 8:00 a.m. So much for getting GR2AE volume scans of Irene while she was over Morehead City. They’d have made a nice memento for the guys, but there was no accessing the data.

The Storm Troopers Return

Bill and Tom returned around 3:00 in the afternoon, exhilarated and exhausted. After showering up, they headed back out into the wind and rain to catch dinner at one of the few open restaurants. They returned in an hour and filled me in on their eyewall experience. It sounded awesome, and I’m glad it was everything they’d hoped for. I can honestly say I didn’t mind having missed it, but I was pleased that they got what they were after. Particularly Bill. Experiencing a hurricane is something he’d been wanting to do for several years, and now that he’s gotten it in his blood, I’m quite sure he’ll do it again.

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We started for home around 8:00 Sunday morning. The first 25 to 30 miles westward were littered with downed trees. Some of them blocked the road, requiring us twice to find an alternate route. In a few places, yards and even homes were flooded. Corn fields had been flattened by the wind and rain, and the tobacco, while not appearing as badly ravaged, had clearly taken a hit. Other more compact crops such as cotton and soy beans had fared better.

Fourteen hours later, a few minutes after 10:00 p.m., we rolled into Bill’s driveway, and a short while afterward, I was in my own vehicle driving east down M-6 toward home and my sweetheart, Lisa.

Will I do another hurricane? Well, I didn’t entirely do Irene for reasons I’ve at least partly explained. I did, however, get enough of a taste to confirm my sense that hurricanes don’t exert the same pull on me as tornadoes. I’m grateful to Bill and Tom for wanting me to join them–thank you so much, guys! I really appreciate it. Those middle rain bands in Greenville may not have been as intense as what you witnessed, but they were a blast, and I’m very glad I got to see at least that much of Irene.

However, lacking the passion required for accepting the risks involved, I would likely be just as reluctant to commit to a landfall intercept in the future as I was this time, and thus I would simply detract from the experience for others. That wouldn’t be fair to them or enjoyable for me.

So, while the old saying may be, “Never say never,” I seriously doubt that another hurricane lies on my horizon. Not anytime soon, anyway. If you enjoy multiplied hours of wind, water, sweat, and uncertainty, then a hurricane just might be your thing. Me, I’ll stick with tornadoes. They’re not so all-fired comprehensive.

September 1, 2011 by
Filed Under: Life, Nature, Outdoors, Storm Chasing, Video, Weather Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Fourth Patterns: Three Exercises to Build Your Technique

This post begins with a slice of my life. Blogs are personal things, or have the capacity to be if we let them. Sometimes I choose to do so in a way that goes beyond the realm of storms and music to other aspects of my world. Today, the pressures of that world have been getting me down. In the face of Michigan’s gnarly economy, the bills have been coming in with a consistency that the amount of business I need in order to pay them has not.  As a self-employed copywriter and marketing copyeditor, I’m grateful for every project that I get. Still, as anyone who has felt the bite of this recession can tell you, sometimes it’s hard to stay upbeat. I need more marketing clients. Yoo-hoo…anyone…?

Shameless, aren’t I. But…I’ve learned–or rather, I continue to learn daily–to thank the Lord for small but important glints of progress. One of them lately has been with my book of licks and patterns for Coltrane changes, The Giant Steps Scratch Pad. A number of you have been good enough to buy it–enough of you over this past month in particular that I think the book may be starting to slowly catch on. It was a labor of love, and I hope you’re finding it to be every bit as useful as I envisioned it would be. If you feel inclined to share your experience with it so far, by all means drop a comment. And if you like the book, please spread the word.

Okay, enough of this self-indulgent stuff. August has been a busy month for me, occupied with family and, last weekend, with getting my first and probably last taste of a hurricane as Irene slammed through North Carolina. That’s material for another post soon to come. Overall, in the midst of my preoccupations, I haven’t been updating this blog as often as I normally do. So today, I’m back for you jazz musicianly sorts with an exercise on fourth patterns. Three exercises, actually, with the latter two being variations of the first. Click on the image below to enlarge it.

fourth-patterns-cycle
Note that these patterns cycle downward not by the usual root movement of a perfect fifth, but by perfect fourths. Why is that, you ask. Because I like how it sounds, and you will, too.

These patterns can be used in a number of ways. Since they’re closely related to the pentatonic scale–pick any three adjacent patterns, crunch the notes together, and you’ll have a pentatonic–you can use them as you would pentatonic scales.

For that matter, you can use as many as five of these patterns in succession within a given key and remain diatonic to the key. The fifth pattern will fill in the last blank, furnishing you with all seven notes in that key. For example, the first two-and-a-half bars of the exercise are all diatonic to the key of C major.

From there, the harmonic applications can get as sophisticated as you care to go with them. I’ll let you hash out that part. My mission here is simply to give you something to grease your technique with. Have fun! And if you enjoy this post, check out my many more helpful exercises, transcriptions, and articles for jazz improvisers.

August 30, 2011 by
Filed Under: Jazz, Jazz Improvisation and Technique, Music, Saxophone Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

August 23 Lightning over Caledonia

close-lightning_1
Last night brought a nice electrical display to the Michigan skies, and my little town of Caledonia was smack in the center of the action.

Today looks to present still more possibilities. With a cold front sweeping in to kick up around 3,000 J/kg CAPE in the presence of 45 knots 0-6 km shear and adequate low-level helicity, southern Michigan is outlooked for a 5 percent tornado risk. It had to happen sometime. Looks like today could be play day for my area on toward the southeast part of the state.

But that’s for later this afternoon, and this post is about last night with its lightning extravaganza. I had initially set up shop in a parking on the edge of town off of 100th Street, but when the action appeared to be migrating south of me, I dropped down six miles to Middleville. Eventually I wound up

lightning-8232011_1
back in Caledonia just a couple hundred yards from where I had initially positioned myself. That’s where I got the dramatic shot of the big bolt at the top of this post, as well as the rest of the night-time photos.

For that matter, the earlier photos were also taken in Caledonia. The color in those photos is pretty true. I was captivated by the bluish hue and undulating, textured look of the clouds. Really beautiful, and quite something to see.

[Show as slideshow]
August 24, 2011 by
Filed Under: Life, Michigan, Photography, Storm Chasing, Weather Tagged With: , , , , , ,
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